Quidly Pro Quo,
Former Israeli spy, Ari Ben-Menashe, had another interview, with Whitney Webb, about Jeffrey Epstein's early days of value to Israeli intelligence. He was working with Robert Maxwell, a major Mossad asset, when Bill Clinton's star began to ascend towards the White House. Epstein was ideal, under those conditions, to become a friend of Bill, and procure underage girls for him, to help keep him from turning out bad like Jimmy Carter, and pressuring Israel for a two state solution; things like that.
(Again, the dead guys head is not Epstein's head http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/08/whose-murdered-corpse.html )
There is a loss of trust in banking. Banks don't trust banks in the overnight lending, "repo" market.
Why not? What do they know. They say the same thing happened in summer 2008.
Here's The Slog, John Ward.
To see banks in the repo financial sector through to 2020 – that’s exactly two weeks away – the NYFed will whack $130bn of button-created money into that niche to stop collapses…and in the first ten days of January, another $180bn. By the end of the first month of the year, something like 3 trillion dollars will have been thrown at the problem since September...After the 2008 Crash1, despite all their attempts (largely successful) to avoid being reined in by regulation, the banks themselves lost all trust in each other. In this playground, there is zero honour between thieves – just children playing at Lord of the Flies. For weeks before 2008 went critical, nobody trusted Lehman. Equally, Wall Street firms stood and watched as other banks circled round Lehman like sharks in a feeding frenzy – sinking their teeth into the bloated whale by withdrawing cash. Barcap wound up buying the bank for a song.
So repo became a channel for offsetting risk while providing short-term liquidity or credit. Banks still demanded collateral for their loans to other banks, and so the repo market became a way of avoiding that by spreading risk and using cheap government bonds (T-Bills) as collateral.
However, since late 2017, lending via the repo has been a quadropoly involving the megabanks. Any reduced willingness by the Big Four to lend there reduces in turn the liquidity of other banks….who have, of course, spent the last decade overleveraging themselves again.
Interest rates have to be suppressed, despite risks, despite withering pension funds, because the current financial system is so heavily over-indebted, that rises in rates will collapse it, as interest service becomes impossible.
Herbert Stein, a prominent economist and adviser to presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, once remarked, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”...Current global debt levels are simply not sustainable. Debt actually is sustainable if the debt is used for projects with positive returns and if the economy supporting the debt is growing faster than the debt itself.
But neither of those conditions applies today.
Debt is being incurred just to keep pace with existing requirements in the form of benefits, interest and discretionary spending. (Not just government, but corporate, and household, etc.)
Proposed Social Security Disability restructuring will kick a lot of people off the back of the bus, older people, sort of pre-retirees, as the system now operates. They spend what they get into the basic economy of food, rent and bills.
This clearly benefits no player within the economy. therefore, I see it as some kind of contrived bargaining chip.
Currently, beneficiaries are placed in three separate categories based on the severity of their disability: “Medical Improvement Not Expected,” “Medical Improvement Expected,” and “Medical Improvement Possible.” People with more severe medical conditions face less frequent disability reviews. The Trump administration’s proposed rule would another category called “Medical Improvement Likely,” which would subject beneficiaries to disability reviews every two years.
According to the Inquirer, “an estimated 4.4 million beneficiaries would be included in that designation, many of them children and so-called Step 5 recipients, an internal Social Security classification.”
Step 5 recipients, the Inquirer noted, “are typically 50 to 65 years of age, in poor health, without much education or many job skills [and] often suffer from maladies such as debilitating back pain, depression, a herniated disc, or schizophrenia.”
Across the pond, Boris Johnson shows which side he thinks his bread will be buttered upon in the coming year, by not going to Davos, and not letting members of his government going to Davos, so as to demonstrate that the Tories have become a party of the workers, not the elites. Hopefully there will be many such signals to follow in the upcoming 54 weeks or so.
This is such a signal. BoJo puts the heat on the EU, whose banking sector is reportedly treading barefoot upon glass shards these days, by declaring intent to make it illegal to extend Brexit transition beyond 12/31/2020. He looks like he can pull this off. It doesn't look like a bluff now. He's got some face cards in his hand.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/pound-tumbles-report-pm-johnson-plans-outlaw-further-brexit-delays
Television Populist President Donald Trump wrote a letter to wily swamp amphibian , Nancy Pelosi about how she's betraying the constitution and stuff.
It's all true, and all circus at the same time.
Big day for circus today. Watch your assets!
Hand on Wallet
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